Microsoft experiences the triumph and tragedy of transformation

When long-time Microsoft COO Kevin Turner left the company last year, it marked a key turning point in the Satya Nadella era. Turners exit enabled Nadella to start putting his own stamp on the company, and the layoffs, strategy shifts and personnel changes weve seen recently are a reflection of that it shows the company has moved on from one centered on Windows/Office to one based firmly in Azure and Office 365.

Since those first steps, the world has continued to change, and Nadella has tried to steer the ship as it does. At the companys Build Developer Conference in May, he took the company to the next logical market level when he announced not just a mobile/cloud first vision thats so 2014 but an artificial intelligence/machine learning focus that puts the company firmly on the road to the future of computing.

Pushing buttons

For starters, when Turner left, Nadella put two people in charge of the worldwide sales organization who shared his cloud-centered vision: Judson Althoff became head of worldwide commercial business and Jean Phillipe Courtois took over global sales.

And against the backdrop of those layoffs, Microsoft also announced that Jim Dubois, another old guard executive who had been with the organization since 1993, and had been CIO since 2013, was exiting the company. It is worth noting he was appointed CIO the year before Nadella was promoted to CEO, indeed a different era for the company.

All of these moves are part of the changing picture at Microsoft. As they transform, that means executives from the previous era are moving out, and ones whose thinking aligns with Nadellas are moving up.

Pulling levers

On the product side, Microsoft announced a couple of new offerings today, and the timing cant be a coincidence. First of all it introduced Azure Stack, a private cloud platform built on Azure cloud technology. It enables enterprise businesses that arent willing or able to use public cloud infrastructure services to install Azure components in their own data center.

Two products announced on the same day that encompass what the WSJ report from last week suggested would be the sales focus moving forward enterprise and SMBs.While one could argue that the layoffs are about simple downsizing, when you combine them with some of the other moves weve seen, it seems like they are too related to the central strategy to be coincidental.

More than three years into his tenure, as Nadella continues to put his mark on the company, chances are we shouldnt be surprised to see more changes like the flurry we saw in the last week. Its inevitable when you start to institute transformational change across a large organization.